Light and Momentary

Bummed

Bummer #1: My oldest developed a dry socket after his wisdom teeth were extracted. He was the most compliant patient you ever saw, doing every step of his follow-up care according to plan, so it doesn't seem quite fair. It was hard to watch him have that socket packed today. It never gets easier to see your kids hurt, does it? He says, "It's not that bad, Mom," but I am not convinced. (This is the same kid who called cheerily from his room at age 4, "I'm all right, Mom. I'm just throwing up in my  bucket.")

Bummer #2: Multiple students plagiarized parts of their group projects. This is such a giant time suck and hassle, and it also raises messy questions about how to grade the end product fairly when other students in the group wouldn't dream of plagiarizing.

I need to actually do the grading instead of just complaining about the grading. But if you have any good jokes or cheering thoughts or virtual light-sabers for me, that'd be great.

Seven Quick Takes: Books Edition

Hi, all, I am blowing away the cobwebs here. I am alive and well, just not blogging. 

Months and months ago, I signed up for an Amazon Affiliate account. Before I ever used it, there was some weird regulatory thing that made Amazon tell me I couldn't use it. Now they are telling me I have a green light, but I have to hurry or they will close my account. So I am going to tell you about books I have been reading, and you can click through if they interest you, and then maybe I can figure out this Amazon Affiiate thing that doesn't seem like it ought to be that hard.

1. Remember when I posted about books I had been meaning to finish? I'm almost to the end of One Hundred Names for Love, and I'm enjoying the second half more than the first half. Diane Ackerman described her husband Paul West's remarkable recovery from a stroke that left him severely aphasic. It is leaving me in awe of his resilience and persistence. I think I will probably wind up assigning parts of it in a class I'm teaching next year. (Oh, wait, it looks like you have to give separate links for book-books and e-books? Kindle version here.)

2. I just finished How To Write A Lot (Kindle link): accessible, funny, encouraging, motivating. Recommended.

3. Stella is way into this Marcia WIlliams book at the moment. My kids have all enjoyed Marcia Williams, but this one is in especially heavy rotation right now.

4. After I finish this batch of grading I am going to buy myself a new Dorothy Sayers novel. I will sigh a happy sigh, knowing that it has not been plagiarized. (Seriously, students. What part of "If you plagiarize, I will catch you and you will be sorry" did you not understand?)

5. I bought a copy of Honest Pretzels when Elizabeth Foss recommended it. Stella is fascinated by it. (I haven't actually cooked anything from it. It might blow her little mind to realize that we could actually make some of the foods she enjoys chatting about.)

6. I am continuing to think about Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's newest essay collection. There's a hilarious essay about better parenting through nudity, and a thoughtful one about the way that we can carry high school ugliness with us for a long time.

7. The Warden is at the top of my TBR queue, and it's free! Happy reading. 

More quick takes at Jen's, as usual.

PS Speaking of Jen, you can pre-order her book and get a free e-book along with it.

Seven Quick Takes: Dull Girl Edition

1. This week was my spring break, and yesterday I was feeling a little grumpy about it. You know how all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? I was feeling pretty dull. I'd set myself a long list (an impractically long list) of Stuff To Do.

2. Things I did: filed federal taxes, completed the diocesan scholarship application with all its invasive questions about our finances, cleaned out the gecko tank, emptied work/personal email and the backlogged paper cubby, steam-cleaned the grubby tracks on the dining-room carpet, and weathered a snow day (on the twelfth of March, I ask you).

3. It was a productive week at work, too, in which I sent a manuscript draft to a co-author and made good headway on another draft. I sent off one IRB and edited another, and all but finished the slides that are due tomorrow for a conference presentation.

4. But somewhere in there I slid across the line from happy-productive to grim-productive, all the while realizing that I was going to have to head back to teaching in a small and dwindling number of days. So today I had some fun.

5. I finished Barchester Towers this morning. Oh, you guys, I loved it. I loved it immoderately. I loved it so much I am a little embarrassed to admit how much I loved it, because it is 600 pages of clergymen's attempts to outmaneuver each other. But it is laugh-out-loud funny, and so spot-on observant. I kept highlighting passages just because they were such a pleasure to read. I think I've found my next ten-year project.

6. I've been thinking about Trollope vs. Dickens. Trollope's strength, at least in this book, is the utter believability of his main characters. You've known people like these people before. You understand why they're doing what they're doing. There's not much in the way of plot, but that's perfectly fine. With Dickens, the plot is simultaneously the strength and the limitation. I love the intricacy of his plots -- when it's not causing my Implausibility Meter to honk like a pack of territorial geese.

7. I suppose geese do not really consort in packs. But I am out of time to tell you more about my happy day, which included a quiet lunch out with potato-leek soup and a trip to the used bookstore AND the yarn store, where I bought one gorgeous hank of laceweight merino/silk blend in the peculiarly hopeful green of new willow leaves.

Visit Jen for more quick takes.

Seven Quick Takes: Typology Version

1. It's Exodus season in the Office of Readings, and I've read Exodus a lot. I wasn't really expecting the WOW moment that hit me this morning. It's not hard to see Moses as a type of Christ, saving his people from slavery through the blood of a spotless lamb. What clicked for me this morning was the similarities at the beginnings of their lives.

2. I knew that both of them were born into danger -- Moses' life threatened by Pharaoh's edict, Jesus' by Herod's. I hadn't realized that both were mothered by young women from royal families -- Moses by Pharaoh's daughter, Jesus by David's g'g'g'g'g'g'g'granddaughter. I'd never seen the parallel in their mutual decision to say yes. Why didn't they play it safe? One of the handmaids asked the princess, "Should I find a woman to nurse him?" Why didn't the princess say, "My dad will totally flip his lid if I bring home a Hebrew baby." Why didn't Mary say, "The Holy Spirit wants to do WHAT?" Instead both of them said yes, an answer that would echo down the generations. (Oh, God, grant me the courage to say yes to you, even when it seems like a bad idea.)

3. That train of thought reminded me that just as Moses was a foreigner in his own home, as a Hebrew child reared in Pharaoh's court, so was Jesus. The One who set the earth in motion confined himself to a tiny pocket of it for his growing-up years: the fullness of divinity dwelling in the modest home of a carpenter. For a moment I imagined the very walls bowing outward under the power of the Presence, but then I remembered all the times I have walked heedlessly by a tabernacle. (Oh, God, grant me the grace to know your hidden holy presence in the world.)

4. I wonder if their shared experience -- growing up feeling like a stranger between two homes --equipped both Moses and Jesus to lead people away from one home and toward another. In hindsight it's easy to view the Israelites as whiners, but admit it: you probably would have joined in too. It's all very well to talk about the Promised Land, but we've been in this desert for years now -- years! And I! miss! cucumbers! (Oh, God, help me to see beyond temporal struggles to the true Promised Land, to cultivate willing detachment from this world that is not my home.)

6. I'd never heard of typology before my college Chaucer class and it sounded like a wacky cabalistic idea at first. It's kind of cool, though, to see the parallels. The thing about being Catholic is that you can be pretty sure somebody else probably got there before you in 2000 years of collective reflection on the Bible. In fact, I checked the second reading to see if it was some desert father or other musing on these very same things, and I had just forgotten about reading it last year or some other time. (It wasn't. At least not today.) Even though it's unlikely that these are original thoughts, I couldn't quite settle down to work until I'd written them down.

7. This is unrelated to Exodus, but what are your thoughts on pictures in blog posts? I prefer blogs that don't have a lot of pictures -- it's more about the text for me. (I almost never go to the Pioneer Woman's site, no matter how much people rave about her recipes, because I get impatient waiting for the picture of flour + baking powder to load immediately below the picture of flour without baking powder. Just give me the proportions; I can imagine the flour for myself.) I've read a couple of posts lately asserting that blogs need regular infusions of pictures and I'm wondering which way opinion runs in these parts. This is going to be a skewed sample, I suppose, since nobody is reading this blog for the pictures.

More quick takes at Jen's.

7 x 7, the end

My boys' Scout troop has an annual pancake breakfast. Always before I've been the parent at home taking care of the littles, but this year I spent seven hours doing dishes. I was surprised to see how much fun I had. I don't spend much time doing physical work with other adults. Maybe I should.

There was a point when I got pretty draggy. I wasn't quite sure about the etiquette of working the breakfast, when it was all right to say, "Hey, I want to go eat some of those pancakes!" I remembered Brother Lawrence turning his little omelet in its pan for love of God, and dried plates for the love of God. It surprises me every time what an immediate difference it makes. Maybe I should read The Practice of the Presence of God for Lent.

Remember how this was Sweater Week? (Probably not. I know my knitting is not nearly as fascinating to anyone else as it is to me.) I finished the body of my version of this cute sweater and am working on the buttonband. I am making it with sleeves, and it always seems a little unjust when I bump up against the cruel reality of how many stitches there are in an adult-sized sleeve. But I suppose a person whose idea of a cruel reality is the circumference of her arm (and not, say, encroaching tanks) has a pretty cushy life. 

Good night, all, and thanks for reading this week!

Teach us how to pray

Stella, lying in bed, says, "Mama, can we say that prayer about 'deliver us from evil'?"

"Sure we can," I tell her. She is a little vague on the beginning, but she ends strong.

"Deliver us from evil! And Jesus, please send me a unicorn."